ItunesController
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TUAW's Daily Mac App: Music Commander
Controlling iTunes with the keyboard is easy enough, but what if you want a little more information without having to resort to the full iTunes window? Music Commander is here to help. Sitting in the menu bar, Music Commander allows you to control iTunes with an extensive drop-down menu. You've got the usual play controls for quick access with your mouse, but you've also got some of iTunes more advanced music controls. You can rate the current song, switch shuffle and repeat on and off, as well as change the current playlist. Volume control is right there too, as well as the album art and metadata of the current track including album, artist and song name. If you want to get a bit social with your iTunes listening experience (no I'm not talking about Ping), Music Commander has Twitter, Facebook and last.fm built in, letting you tweet, post or scrobble the current song. When you've had enough you can even quit iTunes right from Music Commander. If you've been looking for a decent iTunes controller for your menu bar, Music Commander might just be the ticket. While you can accomplish quite a lot of the functionality using Apple keyboard media controls and Growl, Music Commander puts it all there, in one nice and tidy package. Music Commander is available for US$0.99 from the Mac App Store.
iTunes 101: Using the Album Art widget
Here's a cool new feature in iTunes 10 that we haven't mentioned yet: when listening to any song in your library, you can double click on the album art window in the lower left hand corner to detach it from the main window and see it full size. That's not new -- you could get a closer look at the art in previous versions of iTunes. But what is new is that when you mouse over that detached art, you now get full QuickTime-style controls for your tracks. You can then minimize the main window (using those weirdly-aligned buttons, of course), and then just control the music directly from that square widget (which can also be resized any way you want). Pretty neat, and somewhat hard to find if you don't usually zoom in to see your album art full size. This replicates some (not all) of the functionality provided by CoverSutra and a number of other "iTunes controllers," so it looks like Apple has (yet again) decided to make a popular function in third-party apps part of the official thing.
